Large-Scale ALS Data Semantic Classification Integrating Location-Context-Semantics Cues by Higher-Order CRF

We designed a location-context-semantics-based conditional random field (LCS-CRF) framework for the semantic classification of airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds. For ALS datasets of high spatial resolution but with severe noise pollutions, more contexture and semantics cues, besides location information, can be exploited to surmount the decrease of discrimination of features for classification. This paper mainly focuses on the semantic classification of ALS data using mixed location-context-semantics cues, which are integrated into a higher-order CRF framework by modeling the probabilistic potentials. The location cues modeled by the unary potentials can provide basic information for discriminating the various classes. The pairwise potentials consider the spatial contextual information by establishing the neighboring interactions between points to favor spatial smoothing. The semantics cues are explicitly encoded in the higher-order potentials. The higher-order potential operates at the clusters level with similar geometric and radiometric properties, guaranteeing the classification accuracy based on semantic rules. To demonstrate the performance of our approach, two standard benchmark datasets were utilized. Experiments show that our method achieves superior classification results with an overall accuracy of 83.1% on the Vaihingen Dataset and an overall accuracy of 94.3% on the Graphics and Media Lab (GML) Dataset A compared with other classification algorithms in the literature.